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 Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Cincinnati Library Digitizes Sanborn Maps
Posted by Diane
Our friends at our local Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County let it slip today that they’re digitizing their local Sanborn maps and putting them online. They’ve already got two volumes scanned.
Wondering what Sanborn maps are? The Sanborn company published them regularly from 1867 to 1970 to evaluate fire insurance liability in urban areas. Between publications, the company would issue updated maps on single sheets to be glued into a volume of maps.
The maps are detailed street plans at a scale of 50 feet to one inch on large sheets of paper—one sheet shows about four to six city blocks. You can see building outlines, locations of windows and doors, building use (including the names of most public buildings), property boundaries, house and block number, street names, street and sidewalk widths, fire walls, composition of building materials and more.
You can learn a lot about your ancestor’s house and neighborhood, or research the history of your own old house.
Each map volume has a title page showing the publication year and an index of the streets and addresses covered in that volume. You just look up the address or building name to find the sheet number for the large-scale map it appears on. There’s also an index map of the entire mapped area, with the sheet numbers for each large-scale map in that volume. If you don't know the address, you can use this index map to guess the sheet number you need.
Sanborn maps cover most urban areas. Many public and university libraries have Sanborn maps in print or on microfilm for the local area. The Library of Congress has a huge collection. At some libraries, you can access ProQuest’s database of digitized maps (check your library’s Web site or ask at the reference desk).
Back to the Cincinnati library’s collection: Each index page and map sheet is an individual PDF document. First, check the index page to find the map number you want. I was looking for my great-grandfather’s store, H.A. Seeger Cigar Manufacturer, which operated for decades at the corner of 12th and Pendleton in downtown Cincinnati.
I clicked on volume 2, published in 1904, and checked the index:
Then I downloaded sheet 148. H.A. Seeger's Cigars is circled in yellow:
Dwellings are labeled D and stores are labeled S. My relatives probably attended the Roman Catholic church across the street and bought bread from the bakery seven doors down.
More resources: Walking with Your Ancestors: A Genealogist's Guide to Using Maps and Geography by Melinda Kashuba
Free Databases | Land records | Libraries and Archives | Research Tips
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 10:29:40 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00) 
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Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Familyrelatives Adds British Landowner Records
Posted by Diane
British database site Familyrelatives.com added Britain’s Victorian “Doomsday Book” showing who owned land in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland more than 100 years ago.
The book, published in 1873, includes landowner returns that provide the name and address of every owner, the amount of land held, and the yearly rental valuation of holdings that are larger than an acre.
More than 320,000 landowners owned an acre or more, representing 1 percent of the population of the United Kingdom at the time. Nearly 850,000 owned less than an acre. London was excluded from the returns.
To search, click the Search tab on Familyrelatives' home page, then scroll down to the Land Records heading and choose a country.
The Doomsday records are available only with a Familyrelatives.com subscription (about $50 a year); not as a pay-per-view option.
Genealogy Web Sites | Land records | UK and Irish roots
Tuesday, June 09, 2009 2:46:27 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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Thursday, June 04, 2009
Newest General Land Office Records: Master Title Plats
Posted by Diane
Land-records researchers might be interested to know that most of the Master Title Plats for Colorado, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota will be available free on the Bureau of Land Management-Eastern States General Land Office Records Web site starting Monday.
These plats are maps relating to federal government land ownership. They show authorization for various uses (such as mining or oil drilling rights), agency jurisdiction, and rights reserved to the federal government on private land in a township. Accompanying historical indexes list related actions (such as new or canceled use authorizations).
So how would you use them for genealogy?
GLO systems manager John Butterfield suggests that if you have the legal land description and other information from your ancestor’s land patent, you can use a Master Title Plat for that township to see where the property was located.
See an example of how to search for and use GLO patents on FamilyTreeMagazine.com.
Free Databases | Land records
Thursday, June 04, 2009 9:54:39 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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